Shomigo

Shomigo is a mobile/web-based application that makes shopping social & local wherein you can collaborate with friends to make group shopping carts, recommend each other your favorite outfits and make trending collections, wish-lists for your birthday. We want to make shopping right with your amigos!

UX/UI DESIGN CASE STUDY- internship

Summary

Working from home has changed up our new normal. Homes are not just places of residence but now turned into multifunctional spaces like offices, gyms, schools, dance studios, prayer halls, name it and you'll be doing that from home. Humans have psychological associations with spaces like if you are in a prayer hall the ambiance and the mindset tell you the purpose of this space. Lockdown and distanced activities have tangled all these associations and broken our schedules and mindsets indirectly affecting our productivity and work-life balance.Issues like overworking, procrastination, lack of innovative deep work have been identified by researchers closely studying the work from home patterns of users. With so much pressure & lack of social connection, the experience of people through this has been frustrating and infuriating. How might we design a way that could allow us to create a healthy work-life balance while having our experience fun & enjoyable?

tools used

Figma
Adobe Creative Cloud
Miro
Microsoft teams
project timeline
6 months
team
-
Role
UX/UI
Prototyping
Branding

Problem Overview

With the pandemic, all our relaxing & distressing activities have been taken away. Experiences that we would enjoy with our friends like shopping, eating out, or even going out for a walk. Before pandemic, shopping has always been my go-to stress releaser, it is a social experience from hanging out with friends to asking for their opinions and thoughts, to us buying things collectively.With the lockdown restrictions, many e-commerce sites have been thriving especially when they offer alluring deals, one-day deliveries appealing to our instant gratification needs but none of them address the missing social aspect of shopping. While on the other hand, local businesses are dying down.

DESIGN CHALLENGE

How can we bring that social aspect of shopping alongside providing a platform of sales for small local businesses through eCommerce? How might we design a product which makes e-commerce a social experience benefiting not only our users but also local business owners who are unable to bring their products to the online platform? How can we create a multi-faceted platform that features local as well as global brands without individual navigation of different sites?

Solution

Our solution was an e-commerce platform that would promote social engagement with your friends allowing our users to navigate social isolation around online shopping. Using interactive features like comment, share, create and collaborate together to build collections and trends, will make this an integrated wholesome user experience. Instead of having numerous tabs open and sending screenshots or link to your friends you can directly tag or add them to your group cart. Even with the lockdown, where small local businesses is out of reach, Shomigo would be a platform to buy them.

Bringing to you Shomigo, a student-led startup by a bunch of business students trying to bridge this gap between e-commerce and social networking. Our solution was a web-based and mobile application that allows our users to browse through products, trends, collections across different brands, demographics, and styles. To make it a social experience, features like interacting with products, messaging, sharing, making collections together, having collectively shared carts would be featured all present on one site.

PROJECT tIMELINE & MANAGEMENT

User Research of the problem space

uNDERSTANDING OUR AUDIENCE

The company’s product research team conducted the user research while I as a designer was supplied with data. Our primary audience for this application were youth and adults as well the business either local or global that would want to be selling on Shomigo.
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The research strategy equipped was using data that was taken from surveys from our primary users & secondary research. With this data, further user observations and interviews were conducted to deeply understand the market that the company was diving into. I mapped the user behaviours trying to understand where is the problem space identified and how different would this solution be in comparison to the in-person retail as well as online retail experience.

BUILDING USER PERSONAS

After working with our user data from user interviews, user observations, secondary research, and our competitor analysis, our team came up with three user personas that would provide a direction to our product design.

building features

As we were trying to build a communion platform between social media and e-commerce, it was essential to understand both the markets, features they offer and what unique features would Shomigo entail personalizing the users online shopping experience.

Information ARCHITECTURE

After taking a dig deep in our user personas reflecting their pain points and motivations as well as accessing the current markets, these were some essential features that our solution space would comprise of, we worked around with adding unique features that would distinguish Shomigo from the rest of its competitors.
While I was a part of this startup, we worked on developing all features, with further beta testing of the product, some features were tweaked, eliminated, or added building a system map to allocate all the features which we started out with.

Building the solution

Visual design

With our visual features, we were aiming to deliver a welcoming & friendly light tone. The colours and the typeface reflected that same airy & modern ethos. This would allow our users to have a smooth transition instead of being overwhelmed by all the elements, also having a light tone would allow the products to gain momentum. The balance of white space with the product colours would enable our wide range of users to navigate through the application.

project ideation- initial sketching

After brainstorming the unique features of the application, our group worked to integrate them in low-fi sketches which were then developed into initial wireframes. With lots of critiques and discussions, we took the best out of each work to develop low-fidelity mockups for user testing. Below are some examples of the same.

final product walkthrough

The final application allows them to choose their workpal and customize their schedules and to do lists. Additionally, detailed weekly reports show their hours of productivity and time spent on holistic wellbeing.

ONBOARDING

The onboarding experience of this application would entail allowing the users to understand the interface as well customize their experiences with their preferences like setting the time to sleep, wake up and choose interests.
Prototype Link

activity section

The users will be able to add new task to allocate its timeline, divide it up in mini-tasks and add their time frame allowing better organization and efficiency of work goals. They will also allow collaborating with different users on tasks giving them a virtual space to work together.
Prototype Link

do not disturb mode

To avoid any disturbances from social media or other applications, we would have a work mode for hyper focus where notifications and closing the workpals would result in losing treats.
Prototype Link

profile

The users will be able to customize workpals to their own preference to buy things for their pets in the treat store to follow their own and their friends progress weekly reports.
Prototype Link

leisure section

The users will be able to explore different activities to do during their breaks based on their interests selected. This will allow the user to explore new activities as well as earn treats performing their regular chores.
Prototype Link

REflection & feedforward

It was a great learning experience, it had its up or downs but it truly made me understand how to work in a team and collaborate the product development with a diverse team. It was my very first time seeing the product development cycle and seeing how intertwined & circular all the steps are and the different teams involved in this cycle. There is no linear process or given steps to design thinking and UX design is an essential thing I observed, you have to be open to changing, working, and adding new strategies to tailor the process to your users.

The numerous rounds of feedback were extremely helpful to show me diverse perspectives on the solutions and approaches to the same problem. I learned that open-mindedness & diversity makes your solution/product stronger, more resilient, and well-versed.

Working with a student team was easy as well as challenging as they were new themselves to this process but very open to learning and experimenting with new methods. This gave us creative freedom, but had to work harder and dive deeper to see what UX strategy works the best. To think about the business holistically with the brand and not just on Ecommerce and sales was a constant challenge that kept me on my toes while designing.